


feel

by atlas (songs)



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-08-06
Packaged: 2018-04-13 08:50:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4515558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songs/pseuds/atlas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is how they begin: she swears to knock him down from his gossamer, self-deluded pillars of blood and embers, and he tries to convince himself that his gaze had not lingered on the petal-part of her mouth.</p><p>(<i>zutara one-shot collection</i>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. feel

I.

Their first touch is far from gentle or fleeting; he is pulling her by the bends of her wrists, so close that she is breathing him in, ashes and hatred and fire and all. He overpowers her with half-lipped smirks and rasping promises— _I’ll save you from the pirates—_ and with the threaded gleam of her mother’s necklace in his hard, teasing grasp. Katara hates him, hates him as he circles her, as if she is beneath him, as if he transcends her in some way that she is too naïve to ever understand.

This is how they begin: she swears to knock him down from his gossamer, self-deluded pillars of blood and embers, and he tries to convince himself that his gaze had not lingered on the petal-part of her mouth.

II.

They do not touch with skin, the second time; it is the feel of water on fire, of flames on the film of the sea. Temple-tears, spirit-water, all at the tips of her fingers; the moon hangs high, twinkling from its perch on a gauzy chain of stars, its power made tangible through the veins of the oasis. Zuko is nothing but a candle on the water, flickering, faint, to be swept over, made dull, made to bow to a girl with her element surging through her.

 _Aren’t you a big girl, now_?

She wants to make him pay, make him beg, make him humble. Katara wants him to look up at her with awe and pleading in those harsh, golden eyes; she wants to dip her head down to him so that she can relish the sensation of an almost-touch, so that he can perhaps see his wrongs in a new light, so that he can perhaps see what it is like to be vulnerable.

Only the sun rises and he leaves with bruises clouding his skin and Aang slung over his shoulder and she has  _failed_ because even if she has pushed him down he still always, always picks himself up.

III.

The third time is so different that it is jarring; he looks years younger with raven locks skimming over the shape of his scar, and it is like something has shifted in him, something harrowing and soul-deep. This boy is ashes; he has no fire. Like her. There are no trees or stolen-necklaces or star-bathed battles, only the pale, jasmine light of the crystal-catacombs, and twin heartbeats thrumming low.

But he still has the same face, she tells him, even if the eyes are sad and the lips are down-turned and the voice is hollow.

He speaks of his scar, his mother, the war his family has thrust onto the world and she is moving towards him, an apology on her lips before she can think, and then  _she_ is the one making tinny promises, the moon-water heavy in one hand, her other palm spread flat over the ridged surface of his mottled skin, almost  _tenderly_ —

And then the sparkling wall caves in and the moment has been stolen. There is his Uncle and there is Aang, and there is guilt inside of her when she follows after him, and it remains, lingering in her eyes, her steps, her words, until it is swept away in a whirlwind of betrayal and lightning and  _I thought you changed_ , and Aang is dead and her water is spitting at his flames but it is not enough. It is  _never_ enough; her kindness, her promise, the kiss of blessed-water, it was all nothing to him.

He will always be out of her reach.

IV.

It is like something out of her wildest dreams; he has come crawling back, bowed and pitiful, claiming that he is  _good_. Months ago, she would have felt delight, pride,  _compassion._ Now she is only spiteful, jaded to his supposed change of heart.

Katara is far from gentle when she threatens him, fingers poised and sharp and pricking at his skin, reminding him of his betrayal, his faults, of the struggles that he has never overcome.

Once upon a time, she would have forgiven him. Saved him. In a twisted way,  _he_ was the reason she longed to improve, grow stronger—

Now, the thought of him, even a _glance_  at him, makes her chest constrict and her mind go heavy with questions like  _If I had healed him before, would he have come with us? a_ nd _What did I do to him to make him betray us at Ba Sing Se?_ , and he makes her sick with doubts and blame, and for that, she feels she will never be able to forgive him.

V.

She wonders at the symbolism when the pillars of the Western Air Temple crumple in an explosion of dust and rock and grime, and when she feels strong arms wrap around her waist and push her away from the scene.

Zuko.

It is something new: a hold, not meant to inflict pain or fear, not laced with naiveté, and suddenly, she is seeing him from an entirely new angle.

A comrade. A friend.

Katara sweeps the thought away in an instant; they will  _never_ be friends, this fact has been set in stone since the day they first met, beneath the murky moonlight.

But even so, as he falls from the breadth of the sky after waging war with his sister, she finds herself outstretching her arms out to him from her seat on Appa, and for the first time, she reaches him.

VI.

She does not let him forget Ba Sing Se.

He doesn’t try to.

Instead, he tries to make amends. He gives her something: the chance to find her mother’s killer. And without preaching for forgiveness or revenge, he guides her to the empty, shell of a man that is Yon Rha and Zuko does not even flinch as she bends the blood streaming beneath the murderer’s skin, does not tell her that she is wrong or weak when she is unable take his life the way he had taken her mother’s, years and years before.

On their way back, Katara knows this: Zuko can be cruel. Zuko can turn his back on people who trust in him, believe in him. Zuko can take, but Zuko can give. Zuko can hurt, but Zuko can heal. Zuko can care about people, and he must feel an inkling of  _something_ for her if he is able to know exactly what she has always, truly needed: closure.

And when she wraps herself around him, embracing him on the dock,  _I’m ready to forgive you,_  she hopes her touch explains everything she cannot put to words, hopes this cements them towards a new beginning, and hopes that she isn’t imagining the way she seems to fit perfectly in his arms.

VII.

He is all nerves, plopped before his Uncle’s tent. His spine is craned; he is bent and anxious and unable to face this newest twist of fate, and her heart leads her towards him, moves her hand to his shoulder.

 _He’ll forgive you,_ she says of his Uncle, because she  _knows._ She traces comforting circles on his skin, and everything unspoken translates from the presence of her hand on his back, her pulse pressed into him, and the wispy, breathless way he thanks her before slipping into the tent.

VIII.

The eighth time is not a goodbye. It is not a goodbye, it is not a goodbye—

He has taken lightning for her. He has taken lightning for her.  _For her._

The water is rushing through him, stitching and mending and his skin is puckered, a cluster of nerves and a wishing-star of a scar and she wishes for her water to  _heal, heal, heal_ him and for him to breathe and her hands are plunging over the stretch of his wound and she is ragged, panicked, barely able to see him through the well of tears glossing over her eyes—it is  _not a goodbye—_ she repeats, as part of her trickles into him, trying to save him, trying to bring him back.

It is not a goodbye _—_

And then, as if her prayers are answered:

 _Thank you, Katara_ , he rasps from below her and then she breaks. The tears fall, she cradles his head with her water-slick palms and lets her hand rest on the ridge of his side as they stand and he stares down at what his sister has become, at the blood at his feet, at the ashes that they will rebuild this world from.

Katara takes one look at him, remembering the way  _her_  world stopped when she watched him fall, and knows that they will never just be  _friends._

IX.

They are years older and not at all wiser when, one starry night, while sitting by one the turtle-duck ponds, her hand trails up along the angle of his jaw, up to the warmth of his lips. His eyes shine amber, the firefly-lights brightening his features in the night. He does not push her away.

So, she leans forward.

It is not like when she held him when she was fourteen and just forgiving him, not like when she healed him, not like when her fingers glanced over the ridges of his scar in Ba Sing Se. It is not hate or admiration or gratitude that pushes her forward; it is something that has been building up inside of her for far, far too long, the something that led her to break it off with Aang, the something that led her into the arms of the Fire Nation and into the royal-gardens, with Zuko at her side.

It  _is_  her lips on his as she kisses him, full on the mouth. It is him kissing her back, bating and breathless and holding her tenderly and telling her he’s loved her for too long before begging, pleading, wishing for her to  _stay_.

X.

The tenth time is both old and new: tentative, questioning, roaming hands, hot, reddened mouths, legs tangled in the cherry-silk of the bedsheets, skin-on-skin, gently, passionately, touching deeper than words can ever dream of reaching. It is intimidating, daunting, push-and-pull, searing, healing, and something else: love, maybe. And she brightens. The word makes her toes curl and her pulse sing and she laughs into his lips.  _Love._

They cannot change their beginning, but this is how they go on: she wears a necklace as red as fate, robes trimmed with gold, tells him she loves him when they wake up together. He feeds the turtleducks with her every night, visits the South Pole to meet her family, and teaches their daughter how to bend fire. He catches her when she falls, and she does the same.

They have a hold on each other, a hold that dates far, far back, to days of waterbending scrolls and crystal caves.

And neither one of them plan on letting go.


	2. a garden of weeds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Please—” she begs, tugging at his bottom lip with her teeth. “—don’t…" Don’t betray me, she wants to tell him, but she cannot quite shape the words.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> set in season 2.

Zuko doesn’t recognize her, at first.

Katara almost doesn’t recognize him, either.

He moves with a distinct lightness in his steps, smiles with some of his teeth. His hair is tousled and boyish and obscures the sharp amber of his eyes; she easily declares it all a ruse—pelting teardrops over the fire and hoping for the embers to whisper away. He looks young and calm, but beneath the muted layers of serenity, she is sure that he is plotting. Positive that the moment he catches sight of her—leaning back in one of the rickety, tea-shop chairs—he will shift back into the Zuko she has come to know, the harsh, relentless boy with a mission set bone-deep.

Zuko strides towards her table without even glancing at her, and she wonders over it. Distantly, she hears him cluck off the day’s special, "White jasmine tea, with lemon garnish,” in a familiar, raspy tone that really isn’t very familiar at all.

She mutters her order under her breath, fan splayed over most of her face, eyes hardened—delicately downcast in a way that the ladies of Ba Sing Se would call demure. He jerks at the sound of her voice, and their gazes trail into one at the same moment.

Zuko stills at the sea-storm of her glare.

“I’ll be right back,” he manages. He turns on his heel a little too quickly to be deemed polite, but he does not snarl or spit or belittle her.

He only slips away, set off-kilter in the face of her presence, but is still nothing like the scarred, armored boy she had met at the Poles.

* * *

“What are you  _doing_ here?” he hisses; they are a distance from his Uncle’s shop, walking through the lined streets of Ba Sing Se’s lower tier.

“I could ask the same thing,” she snaps, palm dangling cautiously at the lip of her water-skin. “You followed us here, didn’t you? I’ve been  _watching_ you—”

Her mouth clamps shut and she feels red in her cheeks; at the same time, his eyes narrow, and he says, “Uncle and I are  _refugees._ I had no idea that the Avatar was here.”

The  _until you came here_ is not lost on her.

Katara swallows; he sounds so sincere, so  _truthful,_ and it just makes her feel like an  _idiot,_ like some foolish, petty girl-child.

But she has seen him in that run-down tea-shop for  _weeks._ He couldn’t have been spending the time innocently, free from the clutches of his quest. And she couldn’t have stood by and done nothing; her duty was to protect Aang. And If that meant spying at the Jasmine Dragon, wearing lipstick and jade-silk dresses that brushed beneath her ankles, than so be it.

Aloud though, she murmurs a simple, “Oh,” before promptly shaking her head. “No—no, I don’t believe you. Why would I do that? You’re the  _enemy_!”

She expects him to attack, but Zuko only looks like she’s wounded him, “Katara—”

Gracelessly, she almost trips over her own two feet; just  _when_ did he learn her name? Flustered, she sputters:

“You still want Aang, right? Why else would you still be here? Gods, Zuko, I’m not stupid.”

“—I'm  _not_  you’re enemy.”

She stiffens, and finds herself blinking at the change in their surroundings; they are no longer at the heart of the city, but at its outskirts, where there are more trees than roads, the rouge of starlight glimmering over the maps of their skin.

Zuko’s gaze is hard and determined; she wants nothing more than to break it.

“Prove it,” she says, voice high and breathy, and regrets it an instant later. It sounds too inviting, too much like the hushed murmurs of the women in the romance scrolls she would read on late, lonely nights—

He gets closer, closer, and she shivers when the glow of his eyes trail down to her lips. But then they are steps apart and he stops dead in his tracks, a pained, broken glint to his wide stare.

“I don't—” He pauses, looking anywhere but at her. “I don’t know how.”

Katara feels something inside of her loosen.

 _So this_ , she thinks,  _is the Prince of the Fire Nation without his mask. He is glass._

“You don’t?” she asks, voice soft. “Or  _can’t_?”

He’s still not looking at her when he says, so quietly that she has to strain against the thrum of the cicadas:

“…Both.”

She does not think when she closes the distance between them—

* * *

They walk back in silence.

Her eyes are on his lips, which are just as swollen as her own.

* * *

Katara visits the tea-shop every day, after that night.

 _I still don’t trust you,_ her hands say, clamping over his wrist when he pours her drink. Her nails bite into the porcelain-white skin, ruby crescents dotting over the river of his veins.

 _I’m not asking you to,_ as he pulls away.

* * *

“Sugar-Queen, I smell it all over you.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about—”

“I can tell you’re lying.”

* * *

“Just what are we?” she asks him. They are in the same clearing as the first night, and he is trailing kisses down the dip of her collarbone, “We aren’t friends. We aren’t enemies. We aren’t lov—”

“Shh,” he murmurs into her skin, because he has no answer to give.

* * *

“Please—” she begs, tugging at his bottom lip with her teeth. “—don’t…"  _Don’t betray me,_ she wants to tell him, but she cannot quite shape the words.

"What is it?” he asks, stepping away from her, eyes tender, trilled with gold.

She sees Aang, falling to volleys of garish flames. She sees Toph with singed feet and Sokka being tossed into a knoll of snow and ice in the South Pole and Zuko wide with armor and hatred; and then, after one look at the boy before her, she sees nothing but him—

“It’s nothing.” She leans into his embrace. “Nothing at all.”

* * *

They are sitting at the lip of the small, stone-framed pond right outside of the Jasmine Dragon; Katara’s feet are bare and dipped into the cool waters, and Zuko is so close to her that their knees touch.

“So, how’s that Jin girl?” Katara asks him, unable to hide the bitterness in her tone. “I heard you two went on a  _date_.”

He nearly jumps. “Who told you that?”

“Your Uncle,” she says flatly. “I went to the shop to make sure you weren’t up to anything. When you weren’t there, I felt suspicious, but your Uncle was kind enough to inform me that you were out with a nice  _lady-friend._ ”

“I—” he sputters over his words, hand tangling into his hair. “Katara, it wasn’t like that.  _She_ tried to kiss  _me,_ I told her it was complicated and left—”

“You  _kissed_ her?” She clearly didn’t hear his qualifier, Zuko thinks glumly. “I cannot believe you.”

“What part of  _I left her_ do you not understand? It didn’t mean  _anything_!” he snaps, ready to just get up and leave, when he catches the bright, mischievous gleam in her bluebell eyes. He feels the anger taper away from him. “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself—”

And then she is kissing him with hot, searing lips, fingers at his jaw, teasing the angle of bone and skin.

“Here, I’ll help you forget…”

* * *

Skin. Sweat. Salt: on her mouth, on his shoulder, on the valley between her breasts and the bones of his hips.

Their clothes lay in a pile at his bedside, not scarlet and blue but a tower of jades and emeralds, of gold trimming and dull, forest streaks. Earth Kingdom, Ba Sing Se. Where people forget things like the blood between them and tundra-duels beneath the waning moonlight. Where there are only the holes dotting the bedcovers and the feel of hands and lips and fleeting, half-caresses of a girl and a boy made too old and to untrusting by a hollow war.

He moans, her name drowning in his voice and he rocks inside of her and she wants to burst; this is too much and not enough—and they are  _so, so_ close but neither know what it is or what it means because they are young and new to this shade of the stars, this shade of passion, this shade of the heartbeat.

* * *

“Does this mean you’re giving up on capturing Aang?” she asks him, fetching for her robes. She wraps the jasmine-silk around her form slowly, not as coy as she used to be.

“Katara…”

He says it brokenly, lacing the word with doubt. Yearning.  _Betrayal._

She trembles, tying the sash around her waist with shaky hands and leaning away from him. “You’re not the enemy, right? For weeks now… we’ve been  _something else._ Right?  _Right!_ ”

Zuko trails towards her, having just shrugged into a pair of pants, his hands moving to cup her face, to trace her lips, but she shies away from the contact.

“I…” He opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again like a fish stripped of its water. “I don’t know.”

 _I don’t know how—_ the naked honesty, the brittle boy in the starlight, a mosaic of red and white and questions, so many questions, so many things unknown, like a father’s love, like acceptance, like a girl’s kiss, which she offered him so easily that night, so readily—like it meant nothing. Only it meant  _everything_ and more, and here he was, tossing it away for a mission that has blinded him for three years.

“I see.” She is still, rigid, a doll with its beauty smeared. And then, she slips to the window, shaking still. “Goodbye, then.”

His palm circles her thin arm, the same arm that had been wrapped around him moments earlier—"Katara,“ he pleads, but she wants  _none of it._

"Don’t touch me!” she hisses, jerking away, ashamed of the tears skimming her lashes. “Don't  _ever touch me._ I hate you, I—I should kill you! Stay away from me, or I will!”

“Please,” he begs her. “You have to understand, Katara, this is something I have to do. It’s not about me or you—”

“You’re right, Zuko,” she sneers. “It isn’t about me or you. It’s about the Avatar saving the world. And you’re too blind and selfish and cruel to see that—” The tears are welling again. “This was a mistake. Approaching you was a  _mistake._ I should have turned you in the moment I saw you. You’re nothing but a pathetic, heartless Prince, who takes more than he can give! There was a  _reason_ why no one has ever loved you.”

She is panting, breathing through her mouth, and she knows it is too far, but Zuko looks too stunned to pull her back and he lets her go, sending her towards her freedom, towards the Earth King’s palace, where she will inform him of the Fire Prince’s presence in Ba Sing Se, where she will clean herself of his touch, his words, will erase the sound of her name in his voice—

“You know nothing,” he murmurs to her, as she climbs from his second-story room in the dead of night, with an ache reaching far deeper than her bones.

He doesn’t attack her. She doesn’t attack him; she  _knows_ that she should, that it is really the only way, but she cannot bring herself to do it. He is the enemy—the boy who kissed her first, who held her first, who—

Katara feels a sob wrack her entire form as she leaves, and decides that Zuko is right.

She knows nothing at all.


	3. wonder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And he simply takes these shades of her, these nuances, and adds them to his catalogue of all that she is. She does not have to hide from him. She can ask and prod and yell and be unkind and he will still smile when she ladles extra rice in his bowl, when she checks him for injuries after only an hour of training. She can simply be herself, as rattling and push-and-pull as she is.

“Why did you go back?”

Zuko blinks at her from across the firelight; his eyes have taken a stricken sort of gleam, and Katara amends:

“I’m not angry, anymore. You know that.” She says this gently. “I’m just curious.”

He asks, carefully, “Why?”

She answers, honestly, “I want to know more about you.”

This hangs in the air between them for a moment too long. The words melt into Ember Island’s cratered moonlight; the fire in Zuko’s palm seems to flicker, and he fades in and out of her sight—like a candle-ghost— until his bending is stable again.

“Why did I go back to the Fire Nation?” he repeats, at length. She nods. “After the catacombs, you mean?”

Katara nods again.

Zuko swallows. “It’s not that I really…wanted to.”

“You didn’t?” There’s surprise in her voice.

“No,” he says, slowly. Thoughtfully. She likes that about him; he always tries to answer her questions. “I think—it’s more like I thought that I had to.”

Katara says nothing, but lets the admission settle. She understands, really; something will always guide her back to her home, no matter how hard and backwards it may be. And Zuko might’ve just been the same. A little older, more world-weary, but the same, at the bones.

_Lost._

“Was there something there?” she asks him, after a stretch of silence.  _Was there someone there waiting for you_?  _Someone important?_ She is too afraid to phrase it that way. And there is a part of her that would like to believe that she does not know  _why_ she wants to know more about him. There is a part of her that likes to believe that the fleeting touches—to his wrist, his scar, his arm, all growing more frequent—have fleeting meanings behind them, too.

But she does not need Toph to tell her that that part of her is lying.

Everything changes after they leave the Western Air Temple. Or, perhaps, it’s  _Katara_ who changes. Zuko’s change comes long before hers—a metamorphosis of scars and crystals and moon-water and banishment. He still trains Aang, still helps her with busy-work, still speaks to her for only  _her._ Being with Zuko is different from being with everyone else. He has already seen the worst parts of her, the pieces of herself she would never show to Aang or Toph or even Sokka.

And he simply takes these shades of her, these nuances, and adds them to his catalogue of all that she is. She does not have to hide from him. She can ask and prod and yell and be unkind and he will still smile when she ladles extra rice in his bowl, when she checks him for injuries after only an hour of training. She can simply be herself, as rattling and push-and-pull as she is.

He has seen many of her faces. And Katara—

_Katara wants to see more of him. To know more of him._

She realizes that, now.

And it’s  _because—_

“There  _was_ ,” Zuko replies, after some thought. Katara stares, completely taken aback. He goes on, “But I don’t think we are any good for each other any more. People…”

Katara’s breath catches in her throat.

“…Change,” he murmurs. “We all sort of change, you know?”

_It’s because…_

Katara’s whisper of, “I do know,” is more to herself than it is to him. And the sand is warm beneath her legs, the stars are soft on her hair and skin. Zuko’s face is coming closer— _no,_ both of them are moving closer. The fire in his hand is swept away by the movement, by the  _moment_ , and Katara, then, can only see him by the moon.

But it is enough.

“I do,” she says, again, leaning closer.

“Katara…” His voice wraps around her name.

And she closes her eyes—


End file.
